I tell my host sister that the “weekend house” we go to is what “neak mien” have. Saying that wealthier families in the U.S. sometimes have second homes either in the mountains, on the beach, or on a lake. Our “weekend home” is my host sister’s old childhood home that is in a very small town alongside a river. I would say our weekend home is far from glamorous but at the same time it feels like a nice escape from sitting inside at my house in my town all of Saturday and Sunday. It has become a new routine that on Saturday I wake up (at the sleep-in time of 6:45, instead of 5:45) and eat breakfast, do laundry (by hand of course), and go to study my Khmer lesson. Once the lesson is finished, I come home and pack up my bag to bike the 30 minutes to the weekend house. I have come to love this bike ride because once you leave my town, there are rice fields for a couple of kilometers and the view is beautiful. Before you get to the small hometown, you cross a bridge that sometimes has monkeys on it (and these monkeys are NOT cute, they will get ready to pounce and try to take your food). After a sweaty bike ride later, you end up next to a pagoda on the river and a little down the road is the “weekend house”.
The house is an old traditional Khmer house. It is stilted, leaving the bottom floor of the house completely open, having spaces for putting hammocks to hang out. The “kitchen” is in this space too, which consists of two old style burners, which is to say you make a fire on the bottom part and put your pot on the top to cook the food. The bathroom is downstairs (which is new/built by my host sister). Finally, we have the traditional giant pots of water, which is where we collect rain water to later cook with, wash dishes, etc. (but we don’t drink it!) Leading up the stairs, you end up on a wooden platform with two rooms, one large and small. The small room has been designated my and my niece’s room so that is where we sleep when we go to the weekend house. The roof is metal. This is all different from my usual house in town which is made of concrete and tile and is a lot newer! So, the first weekend I spent at the “weekend” house, I told my parents that it felt more like camping (but that is also because my clothes were so dirty because I only had two shirts and two shorts for two days).
When we go to the weekend house we usually hang out, ride in the wooden boats, swim, cook, and work, usually going with my whole family and some students who live at my house. This is a whole separate story, but my host sister has started a dish soap business and so usually my family goes to this house a lot to do extra work for the business, and I help sometimes (which gives me some big flashbacks for when I would help my mom with her businesses in the past-let’s just say I am an expert in taping and making boxes). The first weekend we went only for the days so I only had one pair of clothes. However, that did not fare well when we went riding in the boats and I decided to jump into the water to try to rock some of the other students’ boat.
The first weekend we stayed the night, I also did not know we were staying. Since I learned my lesson the last time of packing at least once change of clothes for if I jumped into the water, I had one change of clothes. However, not enough for the whole weekend (and I did swim that weekend too).
Weekends here feel like an endless summer. Despite it already being an endless summer in Cambodia because it is always so hot, being on the river feels like I am a kid in summertime. Currently, at the beginning of rainy season, it rains a lot in the afternoons, and so in the morning we usually hang out in the shade and then when it rains we take off to the water. One day, we went to the water, raced the boats in the rain and swam in the water... like I said, an endless summer. Sometimes the boys borrow my bike to ride it around the town and we always go to get coffee, snacks, or food in the morning. We cook and eat together, family-style.
The most recent weekend, I learned my lesson to pack more clothes and toiletries. We swam, paddled in the boats, cooked, and when it was time to go to sleep, we all went to bed at 8:30. That’s because we had to wake up at 4:00am to go sell soap, but that is a story for another time.
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